If you travel off the beaten paths very far fly fishing Great Smoky MountainsNational Park it is a good idea to carry a GPS receiver along with you. They aresmall, portable devices that can help save your life in case of an emergency.The first and probably the most important benefit of the receiver is that is allowsyou to store the exact position of any place, such as your vehicle, and return toit from anywhere else in the park or world for that matter. In other words youshould never get lost with a GPS receiver. Just for disclaimer purposes;however, I should mention that you should always carry a paper may along withyou. Although it would be very unusual, GPS receivers can fail, batteries can godead or the equipment can fail to operate properly. They are tiny computers andthey can freeze and fail. Failures are rare this day and time and I certainly don'twant to imply that they are very subject to failure - they are not.Another features and benefits of the portable GPS receiver is that they arecapable of storing tracks. They can store your position as often as you wantthem to using time or distance - every minute, every ten feet, etc. This will form abread-crumb route where ever you want too that can be followed in reverseorder or used later to follow in the same direction.Most all of today's GPS navigators have some type of build-in maps. Some ofthese are basemaps only and others have detailed maps installed in memory.The best ones for this particular use would be highly detailed topo maps. Youcan even store your routes on your computer directly from your GPS navigatoror plan your backpacking adventure on your computer and download the detailsinto your GPS receiver.If you purchase one for this use I recommend that you obtain one that hasWASS capability. To make it short, WASS makes the receiver much moreaccurate. In general a receiver with WASS should be able to compute yourposition to within ten feet versus fifty feet. It also makes the computation ofelevation much more accurate.I also recommend that you get one that has a high sensitive type receiver.These are fairly new. Most of them have been on the market for about twoyears. They will be able to obtain your position much faster and more accuratelyunder heavy tree cover. Some of the older models have trouble receiving datafrom the satellites in the woods.Tomorrow I will go into more detail on the subject of GPS receivers.